117. Nate Silver Says We're Bad at Making Predictions

Data scientist Nate Silver gained attention for his election predictions. But even the best prognosticators get it wrong sometimes. He talks to Steve about making good decisions with data, why he’d rather write a newsletter than an academic paper, and how online poker led him to the world of politics.

RESOURCES

• "Not Everyone Who Disagrees With You Is a Closet Right-Winger," by Nate Silver (Silver Bulletin, 2023).
• "The 2 Key Facts About U.S. Covid Policy That Everyone Should Know," by Nate Silver (Silver Bulletin, 2023).
• "Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the Covid-19 Pandemic," by Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jason L. Schwartz (JAMA Internal Medicine, 2023).
• "Why Weather Forecasting Keeps Getting Better," by Hannah Fry (The New Yorker, 2019).
• "Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else," by Nate Silver (FiveThirtyEight, 2016).
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't, by Nate Silver (2012).

EXTRAS

• "Steven Strogatz Thinks You Don’t Know What Math Is," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).
• "A Rockstar Chemist and Her Cancer-Attacking 'Lawn Mower,'" by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022).
• "What’s the Secret to Making a Great Prediction?" by No Stupid Questions (2021).
• "How to Be Less Terrible at Predicting the Future," by Freakonomics Radio (2016).
• "Nate Silver Says: 'Everyone Is Kind of Weird,'" by Freakonomics Radio (2015).
• "The Folly of Prediction," by Freakonomics Radio (2011).

SOURCES:

• Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of the Silver Bulletin.